I wrote a piece on the phenomenology of place–colored by lenses of sin and redemption–and what it means to be in one. The full thing is here, but first, a snippet:
Who is not, from one hour to the next, one day to another, beset by worry about being in the right place at the right time? It’s a common truism that we cannot “be two places at the same time.” What someone typically intends by saying this is, as with all bromides, tritely true: I cannot be busy in the boudoir and the office at one and the same time; nor languidly splayed on my couch, glutting my gullet with a family-size bag of potato chips and bathing in the day-long glow of my TV, whilst simultaneously at the gym, buffing up and shedding the same, couch-fed calories. By the strictest reference of the term, being in one place necessitates exclusion of all others.
“Place”, however, is a term of relativity and analogical valence at once. On the relative hand, I can and in fact always am in a multitude of places. I may be writing this in my kitchen, which is in my apartment’s first floor, which is –of course— in my apartment, which is in its complex, town, region, state, country, etc.— all of which are distinct as places. They may be somewhat arbitrary places, existing as such only insofar as they have been cognitively and/or intersubjectively denoted to have the boundaries they do –you’ll find no physical marker which actually delineates Boston from Cambridge, or Miami from West Palm Beach, but only, at best, objects that have received a conventional and symbolic denomination as serving that function— but they are places, nonetheless; innermost boundaries of that-which-contains, as Aristotle taught us.
On the analogical hand… (read the rest at LapsusLima | about LapsusLima).
Semiotic Thomist 